I don’t aim at the puck. I aim at where it will be.
Wayne Gretzky
From the southern apex of the Nile delta, within sight of the pyramids, the Thebans must have travelled along its western stream to Alexandria, the greatest port in the Empire. In population it had been the largest Jewish, largest Greek, and largest Coptic metropolis. Temples, stadiums, theatres, libraries and bazaars flanked its wide avenues. The first residential city ever built according to a unifying plan, with Alexander the Great its founder, its university would be the prototype for all.
Egypt was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean and Alexandria its chief port. The city was richer than Rome, its populace more free and better educated. Greeks were the butchers and bakers, Jews the glaziers and metal-workers, and Copts the stevedores and porters. Syrians, Arabs, Armenians, Persians, Ethiopians, Moors, Thracians (Bulgarians), Illyrians, Sarmatians (Ukrainians) and Italians added to the mosaic. The slightest slur, real or imagined, against one group’s honour or gods provoked strikes paralyzing the entire economy, as well as riots and massacres. The threat of ruthless intervention by the army kept peace. The Empire was united not by patriotism but mutual fear of what would happen without Rome’s firm grip on affairs.
Let the Roman Vopiscus describe the situation, keeping in mind his imperialist biases:
… the Egyptians, as you know well enough, are puffed up, madmen, boastful, doers of injury, and in fact liars and without restraint, always craving something new, even in their popular songs, writers of verse, wisecrackers, astrologers, soothsayers, quack healers. Among them indeed are Christians and Samaritans and those who [are] always ill-pleased with the present though enjoying unbounded liberty … wholly light minded, unstable and blown about by every breath of rumour. There those who worship Serapis are in fact Christians and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are in fact devotees of Serapis. There is no chief of the Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Christian priest who is not an astrologer, soothsayer or anointer…They are a most seditious folk, most deceitful, most given to luxury. But their city (Alexandria) is luxurious, rich and fruitful and in no way is idle. Some are blowers of glass, others make paper, all are at least linen weavers or belong to some craft or other. The lame have theirs, the eunuchs theirs, the blind theirs and not even those whose hands are crippled are idle. Their only god is money and this the Christians, the Jews and in fact all nations adore.1
The rustic Thebans must have walked through the streets in wonderment balanced by brio, a healthy military pride. Alexandrians respected the army. One of the worst events in the city’s history had happened in 38AD when a Roman general amidst bloody massacres and riots between Greeks and Jews had done the cruellest thing possible – nothing.2 He ordered his troops to remain in quarters until the savagery exhausted itself in order to teach the public its need for Rome rule.
In 41, and again in 66 and 73, waves of anti-Semitic violence had swept Alexandria, promoted by the first revolt of Israel versus Rome. Greek culture with its reason and rationalization contended for dominance against Jewish faith and morality as it still does. In 115–119, Alexandrian Jews revolted, resulting in the virtual annihilation of their entire community.
A generation previous to the Thebans’ visit the plague had occurred, which killed a third of the inhabitants and debilitated a third more.3 Having no cure, the pagans dared not treat the ill. Terrified and feeling helpless, they were ready to believe that Christians aiding the ill had deliberately caused the epidemic in order to rob the dead. The mob murdered the Christians.
In the cities, not only was there the greatest need felt for a new faith, but it was easier to preach to large numbers of people. Some of the greatest philosophers of the church, including the Gospel writers Mark and Luke, were Alexandrians or had studied there. Most were Hellenized Jews. Clement was alone in encouraging as bishop that converts stay in the army.4
As the Thebans chafed at delay after delay and changes in plans, officers might have recollected the words of Petronius, an earlier careerman.
We trained hard … but every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I realized later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing … and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency and demoralization.5
Carus was emperor. He was an affable fellow. It was his custom to wear and sleep in an ordinary soldier’s cloak of coarse wool. He dined on cold porridge served in a wooden bowl. Whatever his faults, greed for material possessions was not apparent. Meeting envoys from Persia, he had uncovered his bald head and warned that if he was crossed his troops would despoil Persia and destroy trees until it was as barren as his head.6
With approval from the Senate, Carus had left his son Carinus in Rome to attend to the Empire in the West. Setting forth to the East, he was accompanied by another son, Numerian, given administrative control of the East. His intent was to strengthen his family’s hold on the Empire, but the practical advantages of the dual arrangement in administration were manifold. Carus’ temporary measure was to become policy. It eased many problems, in particular the difficulty of interchanging officials between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek East.
The Theban officers inked records and perhaps wondered if there was a hidden agenda as Rome began stripping Egypt of its native troops and withdrawing all forces from Mauritania Tingitania. The legionnaires were being asked to defend Romans elsewhere while their own homelands were left defenceless.
It took about a week for the news to arrive that Carus was dead. He had been killed by a bolt of lightning while on campaign. Lightning was the awesome vengeance of heaven. Nothing was allowed to be built where it had struck. Those killed by it were buried in a hidden grave at night.
It was all very convenient for some people, Thebans could suspect. It might not be convenient for them.
Rumours soon had it that Numerian might hold the Theban Legion in the East.
Routine demanded regardless of politics. Nothing could be allowed to delay the fleet. The grain warehouses of Rome and other Mediterranean cities were steadily depleting. One ship from Egypt could carry more grain faster than dozens of wagons from the backcountry of European coastal cities. The Thebans would sail with the fleet. Carinus wanted them in Italy.
Probably in the spring of 284, within the shadow of the high tower of Alexandria’s Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Thebans boarded the fleet carrying the grain to Rome and received their bread rations.
Final shore leave and, as was the custom, a soldier pays an artist to sketch his portrait. A wooden panel in coloured chalk sealed in hot wax, ‘encaustic’, is sent home as a souvenir of son, brother and friend, gone except for memory. One by one, anchors were hauled in like happy memories to be stored away as future security. Sails were unfurled.
The average merchant ship of Alexandria, no bigger than a modern seagoing tugboat, was 120 by 30 feet at maximum.7Passengers seeking comfort used the few larger vessels of 180 foot length. With narrow low bows and high bulging sterns, the Alexandrians rode the waves like swans, a small mast angled forward at the bow and a tall one amidships carrying a huge square sail. A pair of tri- angular canvasses topped the mainsail and its ship’s emblem upon it.
The fleet leaving port scattered across the crisscrossed chop of waves marching to the horizons. In the sailing season, late spring and summer winds were from Africa, Latin for ‘the land from which the breezes blow’. The vessels could hardly make five miles in an hour. Steering depended on handheld oars at each side. It was disconcerting to landlubbers to see that a ship so painstakingly constructed had as typical captain a sun-bronzed old man clad in rags who seemed to make decisions on the basis of a wet thumb stuck into the wind. The greatest danger was not the deep sea but hidden rocks and reefs near shore. By the first nightfall they were far beyond sight of the fire signals of the Pharos.
Most of the fleet carrying grain pushed directly towards Crete. Other ships held eastwards until, about the afternoon of the fifth day, the change of the sea from deep blue to green, shorebirds and landborn clouds revealed the coast of Israel over the sea’s rim. Perhaps they stopped at Joppa or Caesaraea Maritima or Antioch where the Theban Legion’s officers had received the sacrament of confirmation. Heeling about to starboard, they tacked northwards for a week skirting Cyprus to keep their bearings and reached the Isle of Rhodes, crossroads of routes in every direction. There they could stretch their sealegs and obtain repairs.
In separate ships, families and friends, servants, artisans and merchants would have preceded or followed the legionnaires. The Acts hand down the names of at least three women accompanying the Thebans, by cognomen: Ursula the bearwoman, Verna the truthful little one, and Regula the lady.
Sailors regarded women as jinxes. The timbers to build a ship were cut with prayers to the forest wood nymphs. Beautiful but jealous, they might haunt a ship thereafter. A ship was always a she. On board the vessels carrying the Thebans the only females were the small wooden statues, puppae, decorating the door of the aft deckhouse, the poop deck, their gaudy colours contrasting with the hull’s tarred blackness.
From Rhodes, the ships beat their way to the south of Crete. Within view of that long island’s western mountains ships reunited and divided again as ships began the many tacks northwards the length of the Adriatic to Aquileia, the army depot of north-eastern Italy. Farewells signalled, the main group ploughed the seas due west to Sicily. There they would drop anchor and await, with luck, winds from the south to take them through the straits of Messina. If southerly winds were lacking they would have to laboriously make many tacks around Sicily and slowly sail northwards along the Italian coast, wary lest they be blown ashore.
Voyages from Alexandria to Italy straight across the sea out of sight of land for weeks were made but risky. What could be gained in time in good weather could be lost in bad. If they were beaten about in contrary winds or storms, navigating was hopeless until they again identified some coastal site. Most ships with little cargo and many passengers avoided direct passages. The cargo fleet was more willing to hazard them. St Paul two centuries earlier had sailed a merchantman carrying 276 people crowded shoulder to shoulder, the vessel almost empty of cargo as it tried to squeeze in a second run to Rome late in the season.8 It was wrecked upon Malta as a gale of many days sent the squarerigger crashing ashore. The sailors attempted to save themselves by abandoning their passengers until Paul advised a centurion aboard to cast the boat overboard, knowing that few sailors could swim. No lives were lost.
Roman ships carried a boat on deck. Another often trailed on a line behind the vessel. The two were inadequate to carry half the people on board. The boat trailed astern might help someone who had fallen into the sea but to reverse the ship’s direction to rescue a man overboard was tricky, dangerous and likely to be futile by the time the vessel completed the manoeuvre.
Each ship was crowded, with neither privacy nor shelter, save in the hold. Below deck were hundreds of stacked amphorae jars the size of barrels. These contained goods ranging from grain to wine, beer, olive oil, colouring dyes made from shellfish, pickled fish and meats and the pie-shaped ryebread scored into eight sections that was the soldier’s shipping-out ration. Ships were constructed external hull first, planking mortised and tenoned as if the wall of a house. Thereafter, the inner framework of timber arches, complex but flimsy, was hammered within the hull. Nave meant ship but also was the term for the central corridor of a building with a roof braced by wooden construction identical to a ship’s hold upside down. The hold was without watertight compartmentation. Sheets of copper and lead were nailed to the interior of the planking as waterproofing. Despite the cleverly designed pumps, a serious leak courted disaster.
As night fell the ships lost contact. Each dawn those aboard tried to catch sight of one another with less and less success. To witness no sail in sight from one rim of the world’s edge to the other had the consolation of making all on board realize that they might share the same fate.
Life settled into routine. They did exercises and received instructions. They learned to speak Latin and Greek and write them as well, washed clothing and cooked. They played the Egyptian ancestors of checkers, chess, backgammon and parcheesi and tossed dice and knucklebones. They talked of many things, religion among them. It was a popular topic in the era. And they listened to military lectures.
The majority of Thebans were archers, the first legion of its kind. The double-curved Asian shortbow backed by horn that they would use could shoot five hundred feet, three times as far as a javelin throw.9 In battle, bowmen did not aim precisely but, standing close together behind a shieldwall, fired sleets of arrows. The enemy would huddle under shields, unable to strike back. An entire legion had once been caught in the open by Persians in this manner, its men not daring to charge since the archers would simply fall back in good order still shooting arrows, the Romans unable to touch them. They were freed by other units after a week of living on their haunches under shields.10
Practice shooting was at narrow poles set in the earth. The deliberate accuracy of Roman bowmen was phenomenal. Defending a fortress, they were practically unassailable. In a civil war four legions had besieged one hundred men holding a small but well-designed stone fortress.
The attackers had fired 140,000 arrows without ousting them.11
That the Thebans, many of them Christians in sympathies if not in baptism, were archers was significant. To shoot was not as certainly to kill as stabbing with a sword or spear. Depending upon the design, arrowheads could kill, wound or knock unconscious. Roman warheads in the era were of metal with three small barbs intended to penetrate deeply. At close range they could penetrate a shield and even metal plate.
The men found it discouraging that they earned less than a carpenter or scribe yet had to pay for rations, clothing, armour and weapons, in addition to deductions for pension, official festivals and oiling centurions’ palms for good slots on the duty roster. There were no official provisions for family. They would have to find land to farm or engage in some part-time trade in order to manage … or bully civilians into paying graft.
Most Thebans had been raised in extended families where they learned to cooperate. They had entered service among comrades known from youth. They would seek ways to continue relationships with their families.
There was no educational system in the Empire. All schools were small and private. Teachers were little respected. Marc Antony’s sardonic reply to a friend’s enquiry regarding a mutual acquaintance was ‘He is either dead or become a teacher.’ Wealthy youngsters had slaves, whipping-boys, who took beatings for them. The martyrs Cassianus and Carterius were stabbed to death by their pupils using iron writing styluses. The feebleness of education made all Roman culture fragile.
The army taught its own, providing the basics of schooling, plus foreign languages and technical skills to impressionable farm boys, gaining loyalty in return. Soldiers learned loyalty to the Empire, not merely their tribe.
A man fingered the cheap metal of lead, bronze and silver of a coin of Alexandria. A soldier was paid in imperial coinage,12 not Alexandria’s debased mintage, but he had saved it as a souvenir since it bore an emblem symbolizing the embarkment of troops for a new legion from the port.
In centuries to come, German legend would claim that Mauricius brought from Jerusalem to Europe an item with strange powers, the lancehead that had pierced the side of Jesus at the crucifixion. This icon, supposedly, made its owner invincible. The supposed Moritz Spear, the so-called Spear of Destiny, is preserved today in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches.13 The Nazi Party would develop a cult of the ‘god-killer’ spear in the 1930s.
There is no evidence whatever to prove that the lancehead is linked either to the crucifixion or Mauricius of the Theban Legion. It was forged centuries later.
A shift in the wind as a ship changed tack rocked its round-bottomed hull until passengers sliding on the deck wonder if it might not capsize. Stuck by a sirocco bringing warm fine sand from Africa, the ship crashed into the waves instead of riding bow high over them. Sailors scrambled to spread the foresail and partially haul in the mainsail, leaving the vessel with its bow dangerously high as the stern sank and received the thunder of following seas breaking upon it. The stern was the weakest structure in the ship. Mainsail properly adjusted, the ship achieved proper trim and again surged northwards.
Showers from the north pelted upon men of the Nile who had never expe- rienced rainfall in their entire lives.
In fifty to seventy days the fleet, loaded with some 150,000 tons of grain, arrived at Ostia, the malarial manmade port down river from Rome.
Glad to be ashore, reunited with comrades from the many ships, the Thebans assembled over the course of days until ready to march to Rome. Filled with confidence, probably few suspected that they were entering a web of treachery.